Why write this after 8 months? Because there was this last comic that our artist made and it was a shame to just let it disappear.

So, let’s summarise what happened.

• We got to jam for 2 months.
• Our “pre-production” turned into production directly. As a result, things got messy.
• We ended up with a nice skeleton of a story, an attempted visual style and a prototype.
• Tones of fun of just experimenting
• Bonus event: Spider invasion at the main “office”.

Unfortunately, the team had to break up due to an artistic meltdown and people, who despite there being a pandemic, thought that they should have at least one day of heavily IT-oriented studies AT THE SCHOOL, because, you know, it is so important to socialize at least some times, so let’s have one mandatory attendance day.

This was an interesting summer experiment that might be resurrected in the future in some form.

cute comics by Niki Kubasova

<- Week 5

Welcome to the 5th week of this “project” where 3 game students are spending their free time trying to make a game and have some fun.

This week we spent time iterating inside our level, figuring out what mechanics we wanted to introduce to the player and trying to find a good flow for the movement of the player in the scene. As usual the more we fiddle with the scene, the more we find interesting things that need implementing.

The art side of the project has dedicated their time to testing animation methods and the use of parallax for our purposes.

This week’s screenshot: I’m not gonna go into the story of how the catgirl ended up in the scene, but suffice to say that we were testing the parallax and running speed.

Welcome to the 4th week of this game jam where 3 game students are spending their summer trying to make a game and have some fun. After the disastrous previous week, we have made a couple of nice pushes.
One of them is the creation of the first level which we want to function as the tutorial zone. So we have finally moved on from prototype test scenes and to a shared scene where we can start getting the feel of the game flow. Hurray to the first iteration of our first level!
Another push was made in the art department. First designs of the main character have been created. Enjoy the images.

Now, let’s talk more about what is this game? So far it is a 2D platformer in a Sci-fi setting. Do we have a strict plan of action? Not exactly. We have a story and we are creating gameplay to support that story. All the participants enjoy the process of creating a game in its many aspects. We keep changing our ideas and designs as we move forward and we aren’t restricted by hard deadlines and goals. So, if you are curious about these blog entries, you have to understand that this is a passion project.

For that reason, this blog might be somewhat vague about the details of development, because there is a lot of mocking about. But if you are interested in getting more details about something, feel free to leave a message.

Welcome to the 3rd week of this game jam where 3 game students are spending their summer trying to make a game.

As you can see in our little comic, we learned a valuable lesson about distractions. Despite the crazy week, we managed to progress forward here in there.

One of the more interesting things this week was establishing our version control software Plastic SCM and learning the interface of that. We decided to use Plastic because it is integrated with Unity, so that’s super convenient.

A lot of time was spent on figuring out how we want our lights and shadows and it turned out that Unity has just at the time of our project introduced some incorporated tools for this exact purpose. So the coder didn’t have to make a new system from nothing.

We have written down an established our story and written down the vision of the world.

And here is a line up of some of the sketches and mock-ups of the week:

Welcome to the 2nd week of this game jam where 3 game students are spending their summer trying to make a game.
If you are reading this then I will be honest, the development is ahead in time of this log, but I write these posts after a certain time delay. This might be somewhat confusing, but it’s basically to have a bit of a wiggling room about what and when I’m writing down here.
Our progress so far: we are brainstorming, making sketches, nailing down the story outline and the characters. All these things we wanted to do before we officially started the jam, but that didn’t happen. This led to the coder not having a clear outline of what to do, since we were making story on the spot.
The coder began making absolutely basic functions of a platformer, that would be in the game regardless of our direction. He then discovered that making of a camera system, that is fluid and has certain behaviours, wasn’t such a simple thing to make as he assumed. That bought me and the artist some time for nailing down the concepts.
The artist is also busy establishing the art style for the story.

We jam on =)

… so far this sounds like the beginning of a movie

Two friends decide to take a serious step and leave their jobs, so they can find their place in life. Last money gets spent on a small studio in a small town. The heroes begin to get overwhelmed by new troubles but they are joined by a third desperate fellow who is a hacker…

(from a phone conversation)

Welcome to my dev blog series where 3 wannabe game developers decide that COVID summer 2020 is the perfect time to quit jobs and test their skills in the field of making games!

The purpose of the series is to document our little adventure, perhaps learn new things, share our experience, make an infinite amount of money (a mandatory requirement in today’s game industry).

We are 3 game dev ex-students (an artist, a coder and a designer) who set out on a private game jam with a concept and a hope of creating something that might turn out fun and great.

Week 1:

Originally, we planned to have 2 weeks of pre-production for concept and design/planning. But our circumstances changed. We jumped directly into working on the prototype, writing the story and figuring out the art style at the same time.

Despite having discussed concept before, it still took a lot of talking to nail down what we’re making. And so we are off to a bit of a rough start, but we believe we can manage.

Bon voyage to us 😉

Week 2 –>